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Ruth: Avoiding the Twitter universe

 
Published Oct. 28, 2016

For the past few months or so, I've been in recovery as a chronic smart aleck.

It's been a personality disorder I've struggled with dating back to childhood, resulting in many hours in solitary confinement in the principal's office for making inopportune remarks in the general direction of humorless nuns.

In this work of scribbling columns, occasionally irate readers respond with emails raising questions (you might want to take a breath here) regarding my patriotism, my sexuality, my ignorance, the legitimacy of my birth, my ties to the Marxist/Communist/Trotskyite/United Nations international conspiracy to rule the world (we're quite chummy), my hair, my athletic skills, my cowardice and my complete lack of ethics — all because I simply took note of Donald Trump as a flaming, boorish silly person.

The problem with all this invective is that I am insult-proof. There is literally no jibe or unpleasantness hurled at me that I haven't already received a million times before and often more creatively. Consider it a perverse perk of the job.

Quite often I would respond, going snarko a snarko with my critics, until I recently learned something. All this back and forth is really quite boring. And unproductive, too. After all, is anyone changing their minds about anything?

So it was that I recently made a conscious effort to resist reacting to the grumps. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm making progress. Think of this as a form of cyber methadone for wisenheimer patients. One step at a time.

Still, there are instances when it has been suggested to me that I ought to create a Twitter account. This is confounding. First, why would I want to open a Twitter thingy in the first place? And second, I have no idea how to go about it. There are certain virtues to being a semi-Luddite.

It's not as if I am completely divorced from social media. I know how to email, of course. I also text a bit, but that is mostly confined to trading messages back and forth with the Bombshell of the Balkans over who will pick up the Spawn of Satan from doggy day care.

From my distant observation it seems nothing very much good comes from twittering, or whatever you want to call it. Exhibit A: There is a 70-year-old man who looks like a paranoid traffic cone, who has been known to tweet at all hours of the wee morning attacking former beauty queens and, according to the New York Times, starting nearly 300 idiotic feuds with various people, places and things with the possible exception of the Future Farmers of America. We're not exactly in Algonquin Round Table territory here. We're not even in Alfred E. Neuman's ZIP code.

There are some people who argue the Twitter universe is an excellent opportunity for everyone to indulge in an enlightening exchange of viewpoints. And I suppose that's possible, if you're into that sort of thing. Amazingly, I managed to get through the last 67 years without exchanging snappy tweeting repartee with anonymous boobs who are dumber than a sack of Sean Hannitys.

But it also seems the Twitter whatchamacallit also has turned into a frenzy of racist, anti-Semitic, bigoted, mouth-foaming 140 characters of stupidity.

When the Atlantic recently issued only its third presidential endorsement in the publication's history backing Hillary Clinton, its editor Jeffrey Goldberg told National Public Radio he started receiving as many as a 100 Twitter messages a day from Nazis claiming to be Donald Trump supporters telling him he should be gassed and his family burned in the ovens.

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Saturday Night Live's Leslie Jones, a very funny and talented performer, was buried under a cyber pile of racist and sexist muck to the point where she was forced to disable her Twitter account simply for committing the unpardonable sin of appearing in Ghostbusters II.

Ghostbusters II!?!?!

The New York Times media columnist, Jim Rutenberg, has been encouraged via Twitter to kill himself.

When Vanity Fair's Julia Joffe penned a profile of Melania Trump that irked some trolls, the reporter's Twitter account lit up with an outpouring of Nazi babble, including one entry noting what a great lampshade the journalist would make.

And this is just the tip of the Twitter cesspool.

It's a free country. The Twitter twerps have every right to expose their dense bigotry. But if it is all the same to the George Lincoln Rockwell/David Duke/Breitbart gathering of jackboots, I'll take a pass on joining in on the Twittersphere fun.

Life is too short, and I have other vital things to do. It must be cocktail hour somewhere.